The King Of Lies

CHAPTER 23

I went to the office because I had to do something. If I didn’t do something, I would drink, and if I drank, I would get drunk. The thought appalled me because it was so tempting. But booze was just more rank escapism, like denial and self-deception.

I sat at my desk, ignored the mess, and looked up the number for the medical examiner in Chapel Hill. He was an ex-football player, an ex-smoker, and an ex-husband. He was a good medical examiner and a decent witness on the stand. We’d consulted on several cases and we got along. He wasn’t scared of a drink.

His secretary put me through.

“I don’t know if I should be talking to you,” he said without preamble. His tone surprised me.

“Why not?”

“We don’t exist on some pedestal, you know. We do read the papers.”

I knew where he was going. “So?” I asked.

“I can’t discuss my findings with you.”

“He’s my father.”

“For God’s sake, Work. You’re a suspect.”

“Look, I know he was shot twice. I know the type of ammunition. I just want to know if there’s anything else. Anything unusual.”

“We go back a ways. I’ll admit that. But you’re putting me in a tough spot. There’s nothing I can tell you, not until the lead detective or the district attorney clears it. Damn it, Work! You know better.”

“You think I did it.”

“What I think is irrelevant.”

“You’re the medical examiner. Nothing you think is irrelevant in a murder case.”

“We’re not having this discussion, Work. If this goes to trial, I’ll not be sandbagged on the stand by allegations of impropriety. I’m hanging up now.”

“Wait,” I said.

A pause. “What?”

“I need to make funeral arrangements. When can you release the body?”

There was an even longer pause before he finally spoke. “I’ll release the body when I get the paperwork from the DA’s office. Same as always.” He paused again, and I could tell that something bothered him.

“What is it?” I asked.

“I’d rather release it to your sister,” he said slowly. “For the same reasons.”

“She’s in the hospital,” I said. “She tried to kill herself this morning.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Well, now you do.”

A silence stretched between us. He’d met Jean once or twice.

“I’ll take it under advisement, Work. Until the paperwork comes. Then we’ll see.”

“Thanks for a whole lot of nothing,” I said.

“I’ll make a note of this conversation for the file, and someone from this office will contact you when the paperwork is finalized. Until this is cleared up, I don’t want you calling here again.”

“What is your problem?”

“Don’t jerk me off, Work. Don’t play me. I heard about your trip to the crime scene. You played Mills and now she’s paying for it. It could cost her the case, maybe her job. I’ll not be embarrassed like that and I’ll not be manipulated. Not me and not this office. Now, good-bye.”

He hung up, and I stared at the phone in my hand. Eventually, I put it down. What had he seen when he closed his eyes, held the phone to his ear, and heard my voice? Not a professional. Not a colleague and not a friend. He’d heard what he’d never heard, there in his rarefied office, with the gleaming tables and the rows of silent dead. He’d heard the voice of the violator, the killer who filled his days with chemical smells and cold, unmoving blood. I’d known him for eight years and he thought I did it. I had been judged and found capable. Douglas, Mills, my wife. The whole damn town.

I closed my eyes and saw thin blue lips mouthing words I could not hear but recognized nonetheless. White trash, they said. They were a woman’s lips, flanked by diamond earrings that sparkled like the sun itself. I saw the lips twist into a mirthless smile. Poor Barbara. She really should have known better.

Before I knew what I was doing, I was on my feet. I ripped the phone off the desk and threw it across the room. It struck the wall and cracked apart, leaving a hole the size of my forehead. I wanted to crawl into it and disappear. Instead I climbed to my feet and picked up the pieces of the shattered phone. I could not put them back together, so I dropped them on the floor. I touched the hole in the wall. Everything was coming apart.

I went to my secretary’s desk because I couldn’t bear the thought of my father’s. I called the funeral home. If the mortician felt strange talking to me, it didn’t show in his voice. It was liquid and measured, as if poured from one of the glass containers I always imagined filling the basement of his mortuary. Not to worry, he told me. All I needed to provide was a date for the service. Everything else was arranged.

“By whom?” I asked.

“Your father. He provided for everything.”

“When?”

The mortician paused, as if speaking of the dead in anything but quiet respect required careful consideration.

“Some time ago,” he said.

“What about the casket?”

“Chosen.”

“The plot?”

“Chosen.”

“The eulogy? The music? The headstone?”

“All provided for by your father,” the mortician said. “He was, I assure you, quite thorough in his preparations.” He paused. “In all respects, the perfect gentleman and the perfect client. He spared no expense.”

“No. He wouldn’t.”

“Is there any other way in which I might be of assistance to you in this difficult time?”

He had asked that question so many times, I felt the insincerity of it even through the phone.

“No,” I said. “No, thank you.”

His voice deepened. “Then may I suggest that you call again? Once things have settled down. All I require is the date you wish for the service to be held.”

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll do that.” I almost hung up, but then I asked the question that had lurked in my mind for the past minute. “Who did my father choose to deliver the eulogy?”

The mortician seemed surprised. “Why, you, of course.”

“Of course,” I said. “He would.”

“Will there be anything else?”

“No. Thank you.”

I put the phone down and sat in silence. Could I deliver his eulogy? Perhaps. But could I say what he would want me to say? When Ezra made his choice, I was a different man, his monkey boy and the repository of his truth. Through my words, he would live one more time, and do it so that all present would remember and be humbled. This is why he’d chosen me, because he had made me, and because he was sure of his craft. Yet my words were merely that, and memories dim with time. So he’d created the Ezra Pickens Foundation, through which his name would live in perpetuity. But still that was not enough, thus the fifteen-million-dollar bribe, to ensure that I would continue his grand tradition.

I wanted to throw my arms around him, tell him that in some small way I would always love him, and then beat him half to death. For what is the price of vanity, or the cost of immortality? A name is just a name, whether it’s carved in flesh or in marble; it can be remembered in many ways, and not all are good. All we’d wanted was a father, someone who gave a damn.

I rested my head on the desk, on wood that was cool and hard. I turned my cheek to it and spread out my hands. It made me think of high school. I closed my eyes, smelled erasers, like singed rubber, and the room melted away. I was in the past.

It was our first time; I was fifteen, Vanessa was a senior. Rain stuttered on the tin roof, but the barn at Stolen Farm was dry, and her skin shone palely in the premature twilight. When lightning flashed, it illuminated the world outside and sealed us in our private place. We were explorers, and when the thunder roared, it did so for us, louder each time, keeping pace with our bodies. Below us, in stalls that smelled of straw, horses stamped their hooves as if they knew and approved. I could still smell her. I could hear her voice.

Do you love me?

You know I do.

Say it.

I love you.

Say it again. Keep saying it.

So I did-three syllables, a rhythm, like our bodies had a rhythm. Then her voice was in my ear. It was soft. It said my name, Jackson, again and again, until it filled me, a spirit.

And then it was louder.

I opened my eyes and was back in my office. I looked up and she was there, flesh and blood, in the doorway. I was scared to blink for fear that she might simply vanish.

“Vanessa?”

She wrapped her arms around herself and stepped into the room. She seemed to solidify as she moved, as if she carried some new reality into the one I’d come to loathe. I wiped at my eyes, still fearing the emptiness of vision.

“I thought you might need a friendly face,” she said, and her voice passed through me like the ghost of a loved one long dead. I thought of the things she needed to hear-of my wrongness, of my need, and of my sorrow.

But my voice betrayed me and rang harsh in the pregnant stillness. “Where’s your new man?” I asked, and her face melted into that of a stranger.

“Don’t lash out at me, Jackson. This is hard enough as it is. I almost didn’t come.”

I found my feet. “I don’t know why I said that. I’m sorry. It’s none of my business anyway.” I paused, looked at her as if she might still disappear. “I’m an idiot, Vanessa. I barely know myself anymore.” I reached out with empty hands and she stopped, safe on the other side of the room. I let my arms drop. “I feel transparent. I can’t hold on to my thoughts.” I pictured the shattered phone, the hole in the wall. “Everything’s coming apart.” I stopped speaking, but she finished my thought.

“It’s been hard.”

“Yes.”

“It’s been hard for me, too,” she said, and I saw the truth of her words. The skin was stretched over the bones of her face, pulled tight by her own problems. Her eyes looked hollow and deep, and I saw new lines around her mouth.

“I tried to call you,” I said. “No one answered.”

She lifted her chin. “I didn’t want to talk to you. But then this happened. I thought you might need somebody. I thought… maybe…”

“You thought right,” I said.

“Let me finish. I’m not here to be your girlfriend or your mistress. I’m here to be your friend, because nobody should have to deal with this alone.”

I dropped my eyes. “Everybody acts like I did it. People look away from me.”

“What about Barbara?” Vanessa asked.

“She’s using this against me. A weapon.” I looked away. “It’s over between us,” I said. “I won’t go back to her.”

“Does she know?” Vanessa asked. She had reason for skepticism; I’d often spoken of leaving Barbara.

I lifted my head, found Vanessa’s eyes, and tried to communicate directly through them. I wanted her to know the truth of what I said. “She hasn’t accepted it. But she knows it.”

“I suppose she blames me?”

“Yes, even though I told her different. She can’t accept the truth.”

“Ironic,” Vanessa said.

“What?”

“Not long ago, I would have welcomed the blame. If it meant we could be together.”

“But not now,” I said.

“No. Not now.”

I wanted to say something to make those words go away, but I was so close to losing her, and the thought of such utter aloneness paralyzed me.

Vanessa’s face had paled and her lips made a thin line as she watched me search for words and fail.

“I’m thirty-eight years old,” she said. “Almost forty.” She walked across the room, confronted me over the desk. “I’ve only wanted three things in this life, Jackson, just three: the farm, children, and you.”

She paled further, as if her blood had suddenly thinned. Her eyes looked enormous. I knew what this was costing her.

“I wanted you to be the father of my children. I wanted us to be a family.” A tear escaped and she wiped it away before it could get very far. “I loved you more than I thought a woman could love a man. Since childhood, Jackson. My entire life. We had what few people ever do; it would have been so right. And then you left me, just like that, after almost ten years. And you married Barbara. That damn near killed me, but I dealt with it. I got over you. But then you started coming around-once a month, twice a month, but I didn’t care. You were there, with me again, and that was all that mattered. I knew that you loved me, even when you used me. Then Ezra disappeared, and you came to me that night, the night your mother died. I gave you everything I had. I held you. I poured myself into you, made your pain my own. Do you remember?”

I could barely meet her eyes. “I remember.”

“I thought that with Ezra gone you would find yourself again, the boy I fell in love with. I so wanted that. I wanted you to be strong and I thought that you would be, so I waited. But you didn’t come. For a year and a half, I didn’t hear a word from you, not a sign, and I had to deal with losing you all over again. A year and a half, Jackson! I almost made it, too. But then, you bastard, you came back again, last week, and in spite of everything, I let myself believe. And why not? I asked myself. You felt it. Eighteen months and we still had the same passion, like no time had passed. But it had. I had finally pulled myself together, moved on. I had a life. I was as happy as I’d ever hoped to be. It wasn’t bliss, but I could face the day. Then you showed up, out of nowhere, and you tore me apart.”

She looked at me and her eyes were dry. “I don’t think I can forgive you for that. But it taught me something, an ugly, brutal lesson that I’ve taken to heart.”

“Please don’t,” I said, but she continued ruthlessly, impaling me with her words.

“There’s something untouchable in you, Jackson, some part of you that is a wall between us; it’s tall and it’s thick, and it hurts when I hit it. I’ve left blood on that wall. I can’t beat against it anymore. I won’t.”

“What if you didn’t have to?”

Vanessa looked surprised. “You admit there is a wall?”

“I know what it’s made of,” I said.

“What?” Her voice rang with doubt.

“Once I tell you, there’s no taking it back. It’s ugly and I’m ashamed of it, but I’ve tried to tell you.”

“Why didn’t you?” Vanessa asked.

I hesitated. “Because you won’t love me anymore.”

“It couldn’t be that bad.”

“It’s worse. It’s the reason for everything bad between us. It’s why I can’t open up to you. It’s why I let Ezra talk me into marrying Barbara, because I couldn’t tell you this thing. Even now it scares me.” I looked into her eyes and knew that I had never been so naked. “You’ll hate me for it.”

“How can you say that?”

“Because I hate myself.”

“Don’t say that.”

“But I do.”

“For God’s sake, Jackson. Why?”

“Because I failed you when you needed me most, and because the reason that you love me is a lie.” I reached across the desk and seized her hand. “I’m not what you think I am, Vanessa. I never have been.”

“You’re wrong. Whatever you think this is, you’re wrong, because I know exactly who and what you are.”

“You don’t.”

“I do.” She retrieved her hand. “You’re not as complicated as you think you are,” she said.

“So, you want to hear this?”

“I need to,” she said, and I understood. There’s a difference between need and want. In spite of her brave words, she did not want to hear this.

I walked around the desk, and she stiffened. I feared that she would turn away, yet an animal stillness held her. She dwindled into herself and a mirrored glaze moved across her eyes. Then I filled the space before her, a clumsy giant, and in the shadow of her open, naked soul, I recognized the remarkable strength that was required to love me for so long and with such conviction.

I sat on the desk, but she would not allow our eyes to meet. I wanted to put my arms around her, knew better, and took her hands instead. Some emotion made them limp-fear, I guessed-and I knew that she had withdrawn to someplace inside herself. I presumed to tilt her chin and seek her in the depths of those mirrored eyes.

“Vanessa,” I said.

Our faces were inches apart, her breath a feathered touch, and as she opened herself to me, her hands closed slowly around my own. I wanted to apologize, to explain, and to beg forgiveness, but none of that came out.

“I have always loved you,” I said. “From the very first time I saw you. And I have never stopped loving you, not even for an instant.”

She began to tremble and the façade that she’d carved onto her face crumbled as if made of sand. Tears filled her eyes, and I knew that I could hold nothing back; but emotion closed my throat, and in silence her tremors grew, until she tilted forward and leaned into me. She shook, and I armored her with my body; then the dam of her resolve burst and she began to cry, so that when she spoke, there was a distance between her words, as if they traveled from a deep place and required all the fuel of her breath to make themselves heard. I almost missed what she said.

“I told myself,” she began, and then had to start over. “I told myself that I would not cry.”

I held her tighter. I could not think clearly, so I murmured to her as I would to a child. “It’s okay,” I told her. “Everything will be okay.”

I wanted to believe the words, so I repeated them. I did so time and again, like that long-ago day in the barn at Stolen Farm, when words and body heat seared our souls into something resplendent. It could be like that again, and so I told her: “Everything will be okay.”

I did not hear the door open. I neither saw my wife nor heard her, not until she spoke.

“Well,” she said, and her voice sundered the paper home I’d built with my words. “Isn’t this cozy.”

It was not a question.

Vanessa pulled away, turned to the door and the voice that could not have sounded crueler. Barbara stood ten feet away, flowers in one hand, a bottle of wine in the other.

“I must say, Work, I’m a little surprised.” She tossed the flowers in a wastebasket and placed the wine on a side table.

“What are you doing here, Barbara?” There was no mistaking the anger in my voice. Vanessa backed away, but Barbara went on as if she had not heard me.

“The way you talk about this little slut at home, I thought you’d used her up.” Barbara’s eyes moved over Vanessa as if they could focus heat and char flesh at will. “I guess you wanted one more fling for the road.” I saw Vanessa wilt, and felt my heart break. “For old time’s sake.” Barbara stepped closer, her eyes still hot on Vanessa. “I guess I was wrong.”

“That’s not true,” I said. “None of it.” But already Vanessa was heading for the door. Her name passed my lips, but my feet were slow. She passed Barbara before I could reach her, and my wife’s words slipped through the thin armor of her exposed back.

“Did you really think you could compete with me?”

Vanessa turned, caught my eye one time, then slammed the door shut behind her. Barbara yelled at the silent door.

“Stay away from my husband, you white trash whore!”

Suddenly, I did not know myself. Rage carried me to Barbara’s side and tightened my hand on her arm. Rage spun her around. Rage lifted my hand. But I brought it down. I slapped her so hard, I knocked her to the floor. Then rage filled me again, threatened to kick her, to crush her into utter and silent submission. Rage wanted blood. Rage wanted payback. And the rage was strong.

I had to fight it down, crush it through sheer will. Otherwise, I might have killed her.

Barbara must have seen it burn in my eyes, for she did not say a word until the killing light dimmed. In its absence, she saw what she expected to see, the man she’d been married to for ten years. The empty man. The shell.

If she’d seen the truth, she would have never opened her mouth to me again.

“Are you finished?” she asked. “Finished acting like what you think a man should be?”

“Is that supposed to hurt?”

“Truth sometimes does.”

“Listen, Barbara. I told you before. We’re finished.”

She smoothed the back of her hand against her cheek. “We’re through when I say we’re through. I’ll not be made a laughingstock. Not by that woman and not by you.”

“You are so like my father,” I said, and put my hand on the door. She smiled, and I stared, amazed that I’d not seen it sooner. She was like my father. Same values. Same detachment.

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” she said, climbing to her feet, straightening her clothing with a contemptuous air.

“It wasn’t meant as one.”

She breathed deeply through her nose. Her face was flushed, her eyes as shiny and hard as new dimes. “One of us has to be strong,” she said. “And we both know who that is.”

I paused halfway out of the office. “Don’t kid yourself. You can call a lunatic a genius, but at the end of the day he’s still crazy.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means that an obsession for control is not the same thing as strength; it’s just obsession.” I thought of Vanessa. “I know what strength looks like,” I said.

I don’t know what she saw on my face: disgust, maybe pity. And the truth was this: My wife has never been strong, just angry, and there’s a huge difference. Deep down she knew this.

“You need me, Work. Whether you know it or not, you will always need me.”

As I passed down the empty hall in pursuit of Vanessa, I heard Barbara’s final words. They rang with her confidence and I told myself that it was false. This time, she was wrong.

“You know where to find me,” she screamed, and I walked faster. “You’ll come back.” I broke into a run. “You always do!”

I hit the exterior door with my shoulder. It flew open and the afternoon light blinded me. I squinted, shaded my eyes, and saw Vanessa behind the wheel of her truck. She reversed out of her parking spot and sped toward the exit. She slowed at the street but didn’t stop, then turned right and accelerated, blue smoke spewing from the exhaust. I ran behind her, called her name. I smelled burned oil, heard my breath and my beating heart. People stared, but I didn’t care. I sprinted down the yellow line and I called Vanessa’s name.

She didn’t stop.

But I wasn’t going to let her go, not this time, so I ran back for my truck. I’d catch her on the road or at home. Somewhere. And we’d finish what we’d begun.

I was out of shape and breathing hard when I hit the grass strip that separated the parking lot from the road. I stumbled, caught myself before I went down, then fumbled for my keys. I found the right one, shoved it into the lock, and turned it. She couldn’t be too far away, no more than a mile.

I looked up as I opened the door and saw Barbara standing by the rear entrance of the building. Her face was expressionless as she watched me. I, for one, had nothing to say. My eyes probably said it all.

Then I was inside the truck, the engine hot, my foot on the gas. I backed out of the spot, pointed the truck toward the exit. And just like that, my universe changed. Suddenly, there were cars everywhere, pouring into the parking lot. Flashing lights. Uniforms. I was blocked in, surrounded by vehicles.

Nobody drew weapons, but I saw the guns and my heart stuttered. I found it hard to breathe; I knew what was happening. Then Mills was at my door, and she knocked on my window, her face surprisingly empty.

I’d created this scene in my mind on countless occasions: lying awake at night, feeling the wheels turn, so grinding and relentless. Somehow I’d thought that it would never happen, but I’d pictured Mills, and always, without fail, I’d imagined a fierce glee. Somehow, this nothingness was worse.

I rolled down the window, not really feeling my arms.

“Would you turn off the engine and step out of the car, please?” A stranger’s voice.

I did what she asked, and the ground felt rubbery beneath my feet.

Mills closed the truck door behind me, and I was very conscious of the sound it made, a metal door slamming shut. Uniformed officers flanked me; I didn’t recognize them, and I realized that Mills must have chosen them personally.

Mills continued, and as she spoke, I felt hands turn me, bend me over the hood of my own vehicle.

“Jackson Pickens, you are under arrest for the murder of Ezra Pickens. You have the right to remain silent…”

The metal was hard, unforgiving. I saw rust I’d never seen before. I smelled my own breath. I heard a grunt and realized it was mine.

“Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law…”

I looked up and saw Barbara. She was still against the building and I sought her face. It was almost as empty as Mills’s had been, but something bent her features and it looked like anger.

I felt the cuffs cinched tight around my wrists. Somebody pulled me upright by the back of my shirt. People had collected on the sidewalk and they stared. I stared back as Mills finished reading me my Miranda rights from a card.

“You are entitled to an attorney.” Here she looked up and met my eyes. “If you cannot afford one, one will be appointed to represent you.”

I didn’t want to look at her face, so I tilted my face to the sky, suddenly thinking of the hawk I’d seen from the bridge. But this sky was empty, and if redemption moved in it, it did so in a place that I could not see.

“Do you understand these rights as I have explained them to you?”

Finally, I looked at her. “Yes. I understand them.” Another stranger’s voice, this one from my own mouth.

“Search him,” Mills said, and again the hands were upon me. They patted me down, ran up my legs, groped my crotch and my armpits. They took my wallet and my pocketknife. Under the public eye, they took my belt. I was not a person anymore. I was part of the system.

I knew how it worked.

I was escorted to one of the patrol cars and placed in the backseat. Again, my ears resonated with the metallic clang of a slammed door. The sound lasted a long time; when it was gone, I saw that the crowd had grown, and saw also that Barbara was gone. She would not want to be seen, but I imagined her in one of the windows, one eye on me and one on the crowd. She would need to know who had personally witnessed my public disgrace.

Outside, Mills spoke to several of the uniformed officers. My truck would be impounded and searched. I would be taken to the Rowan County Jail and processed. I knew the drill.

I would be stripped, subjected to a cavity search, and dressed in a loose orange jumpsuit. I would be given a blanket, a toothbrush, a roll of toilet paper, and a pair of used flip-flops. I would be given a number. Then I would be given a cell.

Sooner rather than later, I would be questioned, and I knew that I had to prepare for that.

But right now, it didn’t matter. I couldn’t see it. Instead, I saw Vanessa, and how she would hurt when I failed to come after her.

How long would she wait before she closed the door on me forever?

The answer was unavoidable.

Not long, I thought.

If at all.

I thought of Jean and tried to remain calm. Reasons, I told myself. There are reasons for this. Good ones. If not me, then Jean. I focused on that, and it kept me grounded. This was just the first step. They were taking me to jail, not prison. No one had convicted me yet.

But I couldn’t fool myself for long, and as we drove away, I waited for the fear sweats to find me.